The Emergency Call Came from Inside

Doyun did not take his hand off the speaker button.

It did not look like he was afraid that picking up the receiver would drag him toward the side that asked for names, it looked more like he thought the doors might open if he let go. Five people's breathing came out of the small holes in the phone.

It was a beat late.

When Seojin breathed out, the Seojin inside the phone breathed out after her.

When Sua said, "What the hell," the same words came back thinly folded over.

Doyun did not say his own name.

"Location." The phone did not answer. The bell inside the ceiling had stopped and only the emergency phone indicator was lit red.

Park Eunchae's voice came in over the radio.

"Car 1 status values abnormal. The originating number registers as the internal emergency phone. In the call log the caller is car 1 as well." It was a voice that spoke only in numbers.

Seojin wrote origin: internal in the corner of her notebook.

"Send us the CCTV." Eunchae answered right away. "Connecting to the management server. When the image comes through, don't say names, just raise a hand." Doyun laughed briefly.

The laugh was not a sound, it was the direction of his breath.

"She said not to say them." Seojin did not write that down in her notebook.

The ceiling speaker switched on again.

"Would the remaining person please state your full name." This time it was not a child's voice.

It read the same sentence as if an adult woman announcer had recorded it.

The back of the card grew warm in Seojin's hand.

Letters surfaced on the side that had been blank before.

Do not answer the emergency phone with your full name.

The letters came up black, like a thermal receipt.

When Sua tried to look at the card, Doyun covered it with his palm.

"Once a name goes into the phone, the target is fixed." "Mine is the only name already left out," Sua said.

"If that means I'm less than fixed, who am I supposed to thank?"

Eunchae sent the image.

A frozen frame from the management office CCTV came up on Seojin's phone.

Inside the elevator, 00:19:32.

Seojin was at the left wall, Doyun in front of the control panel, Jang Myeongsu near the doors, Mingyu in the back corner.

The spot where Sua was standing was empty.

Instead it looked as if only the delivery bag had been set on the floor.

Seojin raised her head and checked the real Sua.

Sua had the bag over her shoulder.

The bag on the screen was the same color, with the same reflective strip.

"Sua, have you set the bag down at any point?" "No. If I set it down the food spills."

Eunchae went on.

"No Han Sua in the main entrance access records either. The unit 1102 delivery app log keeps only the order number, and the driver account field is blank." Jang Myeongsu glanced at Sua for a moment.

His eyes were the eyes of a man checking someone he had just met.

Seojin did not miss his look.

"Chief, read my notebook out loud. Third line." Jang Myeongsu took the paper and fumbled. "Han... Han Sua. Completion photo for unit 1102." Sua said at once. "My number too." Seojin wrote the number down.

The second time Jang Myeongsu read it, he got the family name wrong.

"Kim Sua." Sua slapped the wall with her palm.

"Han Sua. Han. It was Han Sua on the delivery app too."

The delayed breathing came through the phone again.

This time it was not one person's worth.

After five people's breaths overlapped, an empty beat followed, like a sixth.

When Mingyu tried to cover his ears, Doyun took his wrist and pulled it down.

"Don't block the sound. Listen for what changes." Mingyu nodded, but his eyes stayed on the gap in the doors.

Seojin held her notebook up to the camera.

Name, destination floor, number.

Eunchae said.

"The notebook letters are visible on the screen. But only the third line blurs." "The paper is right here." "By the server screen." Eunchae added it the way you correct a wrong statement.

"By the record I am looking at."

A group chat notice came up from the management office.

Building 404, car 1, passenger confirmation poll.

For safety confirmation, please select only actual passengers.

There were four options.

Yun Seojin, Kang Doyun, Jang Myeongsu, Choe Mingyu.

Sua's phone was quiet.

The temporary room for Building 404 residents had disappeared from her room list.

Sua put her own building and unit number into the search box.

Nothing came up.

"I'm not a resident. Is that why you cut me out?" Jang Myeongsu wet his lips. "But delivery drivers are supposed to stay in the access log." "I'm not in that log either." Sua shoved her phone at Jang Myeongsu.

Doyun did not press any of the four.

"Don't vote." Jang Myeongsu stopped with his finger resting on the screen. "If nobody presses, the incident report gets pushed back. If we wake the residents there'll be hell to pay." "If you press, Sua drops out." Seojin said, "It may close automatically even if we don't press." Eunchae confirmed it at once.

"Thirty seconds to closing. It isn't a poll an administrator sent manually, it's automatic from the system." "Who opened the system?" "Admin rights belong to the management office. In the log the user field is blank." At the word blank, Sua laughed briefly.

"Blank is popular tonight."

Seojin closed the poll window and turned on her phone camera.

She framed the notebook, Sua's face, and the order number stuck to the bag all in one shot. "I'll record without speaking." Doyun looked at her. "If the record goes out over the broadcast it's the same thing." "If we hide it, the deletion completes." "Once it's fixed you can't undo it." "A four-person screen is already being fixed." Neither of them let it run long.

In the meantime Sua wrote her own name large on the paper.

Han Sua.

The ends of the strokes shook, but the letters could be read.

Mingyu held the paper up.

Jang Myeongsu put a hand to it too.

Seojin checked Sua's number one more time.

"Last four digits 3179, correct?" "Correct. But at this rate is my number going to disappear too?" "We need to watch the order things disappear in." Sua laughed for a moment. "Does knowing the order make me disappear less?" Seojin stopped her pen. "No. But it tells me which record betrays you first." Eunchae spoke as if taking that down.

"They went in the order app, access, CCTV. Group chat was fourth. Paper is still holding." Doyun said, "Be careful with the word holding too."

Eunchae corrected herself at once.

"No alteration as of the present moment." With a number and a time attached, the words sounded a little less like a lie.

Even when the phone was not demanding a name, it was counting people.

The sound of Mingyu swallowing came late out of the holes in the receiver.

Mingyu touched his own throat.

"Does that get caught like a name too?" Doyun said, "I don't know."

The words I don't know came out surprisingly fast.

After hearing that, Seojin looked at Doyun again.

He did not drag people along by pretending to know.

He only put his body in front of the doors even while he did not know.

Jang Myeongsu kept fiddling with the talk button on his work radio. Between being the man who had to file the report and the fact that you must not subtract a person, only the button wore down.

On the management office side the wording was already changing.

Not "entrapment incident" but "temporary stop," not "passenger" but "subject of confirmation," not "Han Sua" but "outside visitor."

Eunchae spoke while reading the call log.

"The superintendent's draft report says outside visitor unconfirmed." Sua came back at once. "Unconfirmed means I haven't been confirmed, not that I didn't get on." Seojin wrote that sentence in her notebook without quotation marks. When the person concerned pushed back, it gained a little strength once it was on the record.

Jang Myeongsu read Sua's name for the third time.

This time he did not get it wrong.

After reading it he called out, "Ms. Han Sua." Sua said, "Does adding Ms. bring me back to life?" but her eyes were waiting for an answer.

The words on the back of the card darkened further.

Do not answer the emergency phone with your full name.

Below it more small letters surfaced.

A full name repeated during a call may be used to confirm the person remaining.

Even after seeing that sentence, Seojin did not read it aloud.

Doyun understood from the card alone.

Sua pushed away the hand blocking the front of the card.

"It's my business, so why can't I look?" Doyun withdrew his hand.

Sua read the sentence to the end and clenched her teeth.

"The person remaining. Nice words. Writing left behind would be too obvious." Mingyu asked quietly. "What happens if you become that?" Doyun said only, "It's hard to come back." Behind the word hard one past case was hanging, but he had not unpacked it yet.

Instead of saying the name, Seojin tested a method of showing the letters in pieces.

Han on one sheet, Su on the next, A on the next.

Eunchae checked how the letters looked on the CCTV screen. "Only the first character is sharp. The second is blurred. The third is screen noise." "What if people read it together?" "Then it goes in through the audio path." "What if we only confirm it with our eyes?" "The management server doesn't have eyes. It only has cameras." Eunchae said that and paused a moment. "Which is why the screen can be manipulated." Seojin nodded.

In the end what they needed was the memory of someone who had confirmed it with their eyes.

But memory was already wavering in Jang Myeongsu and Mingyu.

Sua wrote her name in the memo app on her phone.

When she pressed save, the app shut down.

When she opened it again, there was an empty memo.

She took the paper almost as if snatching it and wrote her name large.

"If machines don't work, paper. If paper doesn't work, people. If people don't work, the body." It could have sounded like a slogan, but Sua was looking at the back of her own hand as she said it.

The back of her hand was still blank.

Seojin held out her pen.

Sua did not take it right away.

"What gets written on my body, I decide." "Understood." Seojin set the pen down.

That brief agreement stayed between them.

After the poll results went up, the residents' comments changed fast.

At first they were questions about the elevator breaking down, then about the delivery driver getting in, and soon they became talk about maintenance fees. A question was posted asking who would bear the cost of an emergency dawn inspection.

Sua looked at those comments and lowered her phone.

"They're settling maintenance fees while I disappear." Jang Myeongsu said, "The residents are just startled too," but there was no strength in his voice.

Seojin did not copy all the comments down.

Instead she wrote resident reaction: moved to cost.

The thing did not need to persuade anyone directly.

The language of cost was already prepared.

Eunchae dug further into the call log.

"There's a repeating 0.8 second delay in the emergency phone's outgoing packets. It looks like a structure that takes in the sound on site and retransmits it." Doyun said, "So it's copying us." Eunchae corrected him at once. "Copying is an assumption about intent. Only retransmission is confirmed."

Seojin took that difference seriously.

There were times when a device with no intent was more dangerous.

Rather than saying it takes you if you call a name, saying it processes any name entered fit the present situation. Sua asked, "So I'm an input value?"

Eunchae could not answer.

Seojin answered for her.

"For now you're a person being dropped from the output. I won't fix you as an input."

Jang Myeongsu read the sentences in the draft incident report and rewrote them in his own way. He tried to change "outside visitor unconfirmed" to "Ms. Han Sua claims she boarded."

When he pressed save, the sentence went back to the way it had been.

Looking at the screen, Jang Myeongsu swallowed a curse for the first time.

"It's not a claim, she's standing right here." Hearing that, Seojin wrote Jang Myeongsu direct witness holding in her notebook. For a man who had been standing by to turn into a witness, one wrong sentence was needed before any great resolve.

Mingyu started to write "I'm in the elevator with five people" in his class group chat. When he pressed send, the sentence changed to "with four people."

The boy nearly dropped his phone.

Sua looked at the screen and said.

"It's fixing you too." Doyun told him to turn the phone off, but Seojin stopped him. "It's evidence of the change." Eunchae said, "Start a screen recording. Local, not server storage."

Hands shaking, Mingyu started the recording.

The not boarded line in the poll results did not disappear from the screen.

Even when other notifications came in, it stayed pinned at the top.

Sua tried to swipe the notification left to clear it, but no button appeared.

She turned the phone over and set it on the floor.

"Does it get erased less if I don't look?" Seojin said, "No." Sua answered, "Figures," and picked the screen back up.

She chose looking over avoiding.

That one choice changed the air inside the elevator a little.

Mingyu did not shut off his own recording screen and run either.

The poll closed automatically.

The result screen came up on four phones at the same time.

Boarding confirmed, 4 persons.

Not boarded: Han Sua.

Instead of a delivery completion notice, an account re-login prompt came up on Sua's phone.

The emergency phone indicator blinked three times.

The speaker said.

"Persons not boarded are not included in the passenger count." Seojin pressed the third line of her notebook again with a thick pen.

Hard enough to tear the paper.

Han Sua did not stop her hand.